The good news is that Whitewater special counsel Kenneth Starr is now looking into the circumstances under which the Clinton White House improperly secured and reviewed highly confidential background information from the FBI on more than 400 Reagan- and Bush-administration employees. A full accounting of this atrocious invasion of privacy may eventually become public.
But the bad news is that, in the meantime, the whole story is being set up to disappear. A separate FBI analysis of the “Filegate” caper has now been released. It is highly critical of the entire enterprise — which seems to have victimized 71 more individuals than had previously been identified. But the FBI inquiry does not address the question of White House conduct. Were Clinton’s aides on a dirt-digging expedition? Those aides continue to maintain, in the president’s words, that “it was just an innocent bureaucratic snafu”: computer glitches and procedural carelessness, with no malign intent and no disclosure of personal information. In short: no harm, no foul.
No way.
The controversy began with the revelation that in December 1993, Clinton political appointees requisitioned more than 30 years of FBI security reports on Billy Dale, telling the Bureau that Dale was “being considered for access” to the White House complex of offices. Very fishy: This came seven months after that poor man had been falsely accused of embezzlement and summarily fired from his job as White House travel office chief. Dale’s ” access” to the White House was already a dead letter. As was “access” for at least 300 Reagan- and Bush-era staffers, files on whose private lives had, it soon turned out, also been retrieved from the FBI.
After an initial flurry of typically angry (and inaccurate) denials about this misdeed, the White House damage-control operation has coughed up a novel excuse: It’s all George Bush’s fault. Here’s Clinton/Gore deputy campaign manager Ann Lewis, in a how-to-confuse-the-issue advisory memo addressed to ” friends”: “Because the Bush administration had removed all existing personnel security files, including those for holdover employees, the Clinton administration needed to recreate those files for employees who continued to have access.” We are now asked to believe that, in pursuit of this unobjectionable mission, Clinton personnel-security officials inadvertently used an obsolete Secret Service computer listing of people with current and regular business in the White House. All those retired Republicans among them.
It’s a hard tale to swallow. The permanent White House employees alleged to have provided the president’s men with this list surely did not think it comprised only low-level, non-political holdovers. The list, which inexplicably stops at the letter “G,” includes two former White House chiefs of staff, two former presidential press secretaries, and innumerable former Republican aides — most of whose names would be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with daily White House operations. Moreover, the A to G list is incomplete; several prominent Reagan and Bush staffers aren’t on it. It contains several glaring misspellings. And the files the list generated seem to have been reviewed not by FBI agents stationed at the White House, as normal rules would dictate, but by a former Democratic campaign staffer now on the Defense Department payroll, a man instructed by unnamed higher-ups to search for and report on “derogatory” data.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen reassures his readers that there is no need for Congress to look into this matter. “I already have,” he says. And?
“I can recognize only a few names” on the list; the rest are “the sort of anonymous people who work day in and day out for the federal government.”
So in other words, only really famous people need worry that their financial, medical, and other secrets might have been rummaged through by a legendarily paranoid band of high-placed political hacks. Bill Clinton, Cohen comforts us, is a “big, drooling Saint Bernard” of a man, much too nice to permit an “enemies list” vendetta.
Maybe so. But maybe not. A 26-year veteran of the FBI who retired from his White House post in 1995 has now alleged, in the Wall Street Journal, that Clinton political appointees manipulated the Bureau’s regular security procedures to protect favored colleagues — and punish career employees suspected of disloyalty. Whatever the ultimate truth, based on what has already been revealed, there’s reason to demand that President Clinton — who once promised the “most ethical” White House in history — fire those members of his staff who are responsible for this travesty. And, unfortunately, there’s little reason to expect he will.
